Effects Of Cognitive Task Complexity On English Majors' Writing Performance

Since task-based language teaching was introduced in 1980 s,tasks hold a central place in the field of SLA research and language pedagogy.Cognitive task complexity,one of the most important characteristics of tasks,has been a central issue in second language task research.The conception of cognitive task complexity originated from the demand of sequencing and grading tasks in class.In other words,tasks need to be sequenced and graded for teaching to approximate real-world demand.The relationship between cognitive task complexity and learners' language production have received a focal concern and second language acquisition researchers have made many predictions on them.One of the most influential hypothesis was Cognition Hypothesis(Robinson,2001 a,2001b,2005,2007 a,2007b,2011).Robinson divided cognitive task complexity into two dimensions: resource-directing dimension and resource-dispersing dimension.He predicted that along resource-directing dimension,increasing cognitive task complexity may lead to increases in both accuracy and complexity.Based on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis along resource-directing dimension,this thesis tries to test this hypothesis and research on the effects of cognitive task complexity on the written accuracy and complexity.In addition,the variable learners' proficiency levels are regarded as the potential interactive factors of cognitive task complexity on written output.Participants of this study were 57 English majors from two classes at a college in Nanchang.They were placed in two proficiency levels according to their grade levels.Then they were asked to write two letters of different cognitive complexity on the same circumstances.The letter writing tasks were carried out under two conditions,one was a non-complex task that had fewer elements and reasoning demands;whereas,the other was a complex task that had more elements and reasoning demands.The tasks were designed based on Cognition Hypothesis along resource-directing dimension and were validated in significant differences by a Likert scale.Each class was classified into two parts and wrote each letter randomly in different order.After finishing tasks,students' compositions were analyzed by some software: Grammarly,second language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(Lu,2010,2016)and Lexical Complexity Analyzer(Lu,2012).Four students in each class were selected randomly for an interview.The results show partially support to Robinson's prediction,that is,increased task complexity leading to greater lexical complexity and accuracy.But it shows no significant effects on syntactic complexity.To some extent,this indicated that students may improve their written output accuracy and complexity when teachers provide appropriate tasks for students.From interview,participants admitted that one of the letters is more complex than the other because one of the letters has more information and they need to consider more when writing.It indicates that learners would pay more attention on forms when cognitive task complexity increases.In addition,there are no interactive effects between learners' proficiency levels and cognitive task complexity on writing performance.In other words,there are no obvious connection between the effects of cognitive task complexity on writing performance and learners' proficiency levels.Whatever students' proficiency levels are,their written output of lexical complexity and accuracy would be affected by cognitive task complexity.This study has partially tested Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis,further enriched cognitive task complexity theory,and provided second language researchers,curriculum developers and teachers with some implications.